Ever wanted a full DBLP database file containing all publication information for a given author (presumably yourself)? DBLP is a computer science bibliography database. Journals tracked on this site include VLDB, the IEEE Transactions, the ACM Transactions, and conference data.

I’ve put together a dblp2bibtex utility, written in Haskell, that enables authors to download all publication data from DBLP, for a given author. It’s open source on GitHub. Usage:

dblp2bibtex [OPTIONS]
A Haskell utility to generate bibtex files for an author identified with a DBLP URI

Connected web of semantic content

The semantic web is not the “future”, it is the now. Semantic web technologies have matured in recent years, at the rapid rate in which enriched web content has emerged on the linked open data cloud. Take a look, http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/imagemap.html ! Whatever language you choose to adopt, you can be sure that they’ll be a feature rich semantic web library to match. I can vouch for RDF4H [1] for Haskell and Jena [2] for Java.

Why the need for embedded semantics?

Firstly, to understand embedded RDFa, one should appreciate the value in semantics on the web. Why have many organizations (including the BBC [3] and the British Library [4]) invested a lot of time semantizing existing web content and data? Simply put, from the very beginning of the World Wide Web, it has been a connected network of human readable documents, largely made up of documents written in the markup language – HTML. We’ve been able to learn from one another, distribute information to wide audiences, and read weather reports for our respective regions of the world.

The problem

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are both broadly defined as a connected network of human readable resources. Given two blog posts on two separate webpages, how do I discover whether they discuss similar or identical concepts? I have to read them and check! Isn’t this all a bit cumbersome?! How do people make discoveries on the web… Search for text in one’s favourite search engine? When I’m enthralled by an entertaining blog post, how do I find other posts that touch on how to start a blog, or by the same author, or posted within the last month etc…

The Solution? RDF + Ontology Reuse!

I’ve recently encountered a need transform named graphs expressed in RDF, into sparql update requests… with the ultimate goal of autonomously pushing named graphs into rdf stores via a sparql endpoint.

I have previously blogged about the future direction of the Fedora project here

But what is all of this skepticism around Gnome 3? Yesterday, I pushed through into Rawhide, so I could get my hands on the first major release of Gnome in many years. And may I just say:

Congratulations to everyone involved in the Gnome project !!!

Gnome 3 feels very sleek, unobtrusive, extremely solid, and intuitive. There may be (deliberate) functional omisions through its design mandate, but give it time – a few things feel more natural after a few hours of using the environment. Such as the lack of a maximize button… For a start, I’ve been a KDE user for the last 3 years, and I’ve always used the ‘drag-to-edge’ function for doing this. And this behavior just feels `right’.

Well done designers, coders, testers, contributors… The fact Gnome 3 will be the default DE for Fedora 15 really does put the Fedora Project back in the game!

I read Planet Fedora each day, and the disgruntled voice of early Gnome 3.0 adopters is getting louder by the day. The feelings are epitomized by this graphic (source here):

I dabble between fluxbox and KDE 4.5 on my main PC, depending on my intention to be productive against my desire to have some eye candy. But… can I say that I *love* the state the the KDE Desktop Environment is now in, at 4.5! It is super stable, kwin is now more efficient than ever, and the DE really does feel polished and carefully considered in every corner of its design.

How did the KDE project achieve this? I remember back when KDE 4.0 was released. The backlash from the faithful KDE community was a lot louder than the Gnome 3.0 complaints. This link shows the state of the DE when it was released. Sure, version 4.0 was feature incomplete, but KDE 4.5 wouldn’t be so brilliant if it wasn’t for the fundamental rewrite in the KDE4 libraries. It is people like Aaron Seigo, of the KDE team, who had a vision. and wasn’t deterred during the KDE 4.0 transition, and can now see the fruits of his labour present throughout the KDE DE. Check out his blog.

So, KDE 4.0 was ultimately good for the KDE project. Why can’t Gnome 3.0 be great for the Gnome project? And for those people who are disappointed that their distro of choice is planning to move to Gnome 3.0, there is an answer. It was the approach that was taken by many KDE 3.5.* fans. And that is – stick with your current distro version release. Take Fedora – Fedora 14 came with Gnome 2.32 by default. A lot of Fedora users want new software as soon as it lands, to test, explore, and provide early feedback upstream. Failing that, when Fedora 15 is released with Gnome 3.0, don’t upgrade. It’s quite simple. What about your favourite software packages? Many of them will be packaged for Fedora 14. This page makes is clear that Fedora 14 will actively maintained until 1 month after Fedora 16 is released. By then, Gnome 3.* may have some of the features you’d have missed in 3.0.